Paramis: The Heart of
Buddha's Teaching
and Our Own Practice

Sylvia Boorstein

This article is adapted from a one-day workshop
offered by Sylvia Boorstein at the Barre Center for
Buddhist Studies on April 5, 1997. Since that time,
Sylvia has also taught a ten-week course on Paramis at
the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California.

We begin this day of practice in the traditional way of
honoring the Buddha and all those others who have awakened to
the possibility of living a fully wise and compassionate
life. We take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the
Sangha.

When I reflect on what it means to take refuge in the
Buddha, I often think that the Buddha was a human being, just
like us, and we share with him and with all awakened beings
that capacity to see clearly, to be fully awake, responding
always with kindness and compassion. It's very thrilling for
me to think about that capacity and to use awakened beings a
role models.

When I think about taking refuge in the Dharma, I think
about what a relief it is to have had so many people practice
before me. I don't have to reinvent the wheel. The fact that
the path of practice has worked for so many others gives me
confidence that it can work for me as well.

In reflecting on taking refuge in the Sangha, I think
about how fortunate I am, how fortunate we all are, to have
friends and family and a community of people who are eager to
support us in our practice. I am grateful to all my
companions who share with me the sense of the inevitable
challenge of being alive as well as seeing the possibility
for living life with grace and appreciation.

Let's sit quietly for a while together and use our
reflection of gratitude for the possibility of practice to
inspire our zeal to study together today. You can further
inspire your dedication to practice by reflecting on your
motivation for practice. Perhaps you'll feel inspired, as I
do, by the verse from the Dhammapada which carries the
triple imperative to turn away from all evil-doing, to do
what is good, and to purify your heart. I am always inspired
and motivated in my practice by my faith that this
possibility exists.

This is a day about cultivating the paramis, the
fully cultivated mind and heart qualities of a bodhisattva,
of a Buddha, of a fully awakened being. One of the roots of
the word parami conveys the sense of "supreme
quality." Paramita means "going toward"
something, going toward perfection.

In traditional texts, the ten paramis are presented in a
particular order, beginning with generosity and ending with
equanimity. In preparing for our workshop today, I
constructed this chart, listing the ten paramis, their
characteristics, functions, manifestations, and proximal
causes, using the text in A Treatise on the
Paramis by AcÓriya DhammapÓla as my guide.

I wondered, as I prepared the chart, whether it would work
as a "flow-sheet" in chemistry, with one quality in
fact conditioning the next in a way that seemed natural. My
sense is that each of the paramis really includes all of the
others and can be restated using the characteristics other
paramis in their definition, that each parami is a hologram
for the other nine. The Buddha taught that generosity
was the first of the paramis because most people have
something they can relinquish. In the largest sense,
generosity is not giving away material things. It is
non-clinging. As you can see in the chart, the proximal cause
of generosity is seeing what can be relinquished.

For myself, giving up attachment to ideas, attachment to
views, has been a much more difficult challenge than giving
away material things. When I have been able to give up my
attachment to views, it has seemed like an act of generosity
both to myself and to others.

I've been able to give up views when I've recognized that
I didn't need them to protect my sense of self. In fact, they
are easier to give up when I see that attachment to views
constructs a sense of separate self and adds to my suffering.
Students of the Zen teacher Seung Sahn report that he often
said, "Only keep Don't-Know Mind." Another teacher
of mine once said that a helpful mantra to be recited daily
by anyone who teaches is "I could be wrong."

I think another manifestation of generosity is giving up
destructive habits or lingering grudges. In moments of clear
seeing, which come through practice and perhaps by grace, we
understand that anything we hold on to, whether material or
emotional, is a potential source of complication and of
suffering. With that understanding, generosity becomes easy.

Morality is the second of the paramis.
The commentarial tradition says morality has a composing
effect. The practice of morality steadies and balances the
mind and allows it to see clearly. Seeing clearly, we know
that there's a tremendous amount of inevitable pain that is
part of life experience, and the impulse to respond with
impeccable morality, to not add further pain to the
inevitable discomfort of life, becomes spontaneous.

The parami of renunciation is often
thought of as giving up something tangible in life. In
Buddhist scripture it is usually to describe renouncing the
world and joining the Order of monks and nuns. I find it more
helpful to think of renouncing the habitual patterns of mind
that keep me enslaved more than renouncing a particular
lifestyle. Perhaps that's because at those times in my life
when I have needed to make a choice in terms of a more
skillful lifestyle or habit, my experience has been that my
strong decision to make a change made the actual changing
fairly easy. It's been much harder for me to change the
habits of my heart.

It's not easy to stay balanced. The mind's habitual
response to pleasant stimulus is to grasp it; its habitual
response to unpleasant experience is aversion. Neutral
moments are not so interesting, and we tend to stop paying
attention to them.

I feared in the beginning of my practice that things
wouldn't feel as good or taste as good or sound as good or
anything else as good, because a lot of the practice stories
I heard talked about extinguishing lust. I still experience
lust. And, while renunciation means to me giving up outbursts
of anger in favor of a more considered, helpful response, I
still recognize when I am annoyed.

I believe that renunciation is more a question of not
being bound by or being a victim of the lusts and desires and
angers that naturally arise as the result of having a body. I
believe this is the difference between a compulsion or an
addiction, which is always burdensome, and the possibility of
making conscious choices, which is not burdensome. I don't
see renunciation as the difference between monastic and
non-monastic lifestyles, but between being a victim of mind
states, driven by compulsions, and being free to make a
choice.

Restraint is a characteristic of renunciation. I remember
Joseph Goldstein, one of my teachers and my friend, saying
that restraint allowed for the verification of the empty
nature of sense desire. In thinking about restraint, the most
mundane example comes to mind.

I receive lots of mail order catalogs. Probably you do,
too. My first thought often is, "No, I don't need
anything." But the catalogs have interesting covers, and
sometimes I think, "Well, I'll just look inside."
Not infrequently, when I look through a catalog, I find
something in it that I didn't want or need two minutes
before. In the moment of discovering it, and noticing that
it's attractive, I suddenly feel that I want it.

I think that it's the nature of the mind to move toward
pleasant experience in a grasping way. It's not my hope for
myself that my practice will lead me to a time that there is
no movement of my mind toward things that are pleasant. What
I hope will happen is that I will never be driven or
compelled by wanting. In the matter of catalogs, my rule for
myself is not to make a decision in the midst of a moment of
lust.

Wisdom is the fourth of the paramis, and
its characteristic is clarity. Clarity seems the naturally
developing result of restraint. When the movements of the
mind in greed, hatred and delusion are fueled by stories --
"I need this." "I don't like this."
"This is boring." -- truly clear seeing is not
possible. When the movements of the attention, fueled by
stories, are attenuated by the capacity for restraint,
clarity emerges.

Validating for oneself the third noble truth of the
Buddha, that peace is possible in this very life, requires
only one moment of personal experience. If a moment is free,
it's free; if there is suffering, there is suffering. The
clarity to recognize freedom, even a moment of freedom, can
lead to faith that becomes unshakable. Otherwise it's just
hearsay.

In a moment of clear awareness we recognize the pain in
our life and realize that we have the capacity to manage it.
It's a great liberation to know that you don't need to be
pleased in order to be happy. I think this is what leads to
energy. On the chart you'll notice that a characteristic of
energy is indefatigability. I don't think that means that you
never get tired -- I think it means resoluteness and
dedication to practice.

I once heard a story about Chogyam Trungpa, that he
classically would say to students at the end of the first day
of retreat practice, "I'm sure that many of you would
now like to go home." Then he would laugh, and he'd say,
"Too late."

I think that there's a point at which each of us begins to
intuit that there's a way to live life more gracefully and
more peacefully. I think there's another point, very
important in developing practice, when we experience that
possibility for ourselves.

Patience is the next of the paramis. One
way to think about patience is reflecting on the ability to
wait when anger arises in the mind. Lots of things make us
angry. Often we feel the victim of something, and, especially
when we feel we're unjustly a victim, a lot of energy comes
up around righteous indignation. Patience allows us to wait
until the cloud of anger, which distorts the mind, subsides
so we can decide on appropriate action. I once heard someone
ask of the Dalai Lama, "Do you ever get angry?" He
responded, "Of course. Things happen. They're not what
you wanted to have happen; anger arises. But it's not a
problem."

On another occasion, the Dalai Lama was teaching about
patience, using as his text Shantideva's Guide to the
Bodhisattva's Way of Life. He read each verse of Chapter
6 (the chapter on Patience) -- 134 verses -- and commented on
each one. Each verse proposed different situations in which
anger arises in the mind and proposed appropriate responses.
As the Dalai Lama read the last verse he leaned forward and
held his head. Since my principal hindrance is worry, I
thought, "Oh dear, something has happened to him."
Then he picked up his head, and I saw that he was crying.
Since I know he's taught this chapter and verse many times, I
was touched by how much it obviously moved him to say that
any response to vexation other than patience is unwise. Just
unwise. If we have the patience to wait, waiting leads to
clarity, and clarity allows for the truth of the situation to
emerge.

The next parami is truthfulness. Every
moment of mindfulness is a moment of truthfulness, of
directed knowing. Direct and clear, true understanding is
such a relief. It inspires determination in practice. And
when we see the truth of how things are, our capacity for
loving-kindness, for metta, increases. We see people just the
way they are -- as people, like ourselves, struggling to be
content, to be happy, to live gracefully -- not as people
about whom we have substantive commentaries that put them in
categories of friends or enemies. As we become less
judgmental and more tolerant, more able to understand that
things and people are the way they are as a result of complex
and legitimate causes, our capacity for balanced equanimity
increases.

In choosing one story, in the service of creating an
edited version of a whole day's teaching on the paramis, here
is a story that combines the capacity for seeing the truth,
the determination to tell the truth, a moment of genuine
metta, and the joy of equanimity.

About a year ago, I was fortunate to be part of a group of
twenty-six Western teachers of Buddhism who went to
Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama. A trip to India is
difficult under any circumstances and Dharamsala is harder
than Delhi. Nevertheless, this was a trip I would not have
missed. I was excited about meeting with the Dalai Lama and
excited to meet the twenty-five other teachers.

Our group of teachers gathered for several days before the
meetings with the Dalai Lama to establish the agenda for our
time with him. I knew perhaps half of the other teachers and
only some of them well. At the start I noted that there were
really three categories of people there: people I knew quite
well and liked, people I didn't know at all, and a few people
I knew but didn't have a good feeling about. For various
reasons, all in the past, I had been negatively affected by
these persons in some way. But, here we were far away, all of
us with high alertness.

On our first day of meeting together, my friend Jack
Kornfield who was the facilitator, said, "Let's go
around the room and introduce ourselves. Each of us will say
our names and what we see as our current and greatest
spiritual challenge in our personal lives and in our teaching
lives." I thought, "This is a most intimate
question to respond to in a group of twenty-six people, most
of whom I don't know." But, I couldn't leave, I couldn't
say, "I've decided not to come to Dharamsala." I
didn't even have to make a decision about when to talk be
cause Jack said, "I'll go first, I'll pass the
microphone around and everyone will go in order." I had
the same feeling that I have half-way down a ski slope, or in
a dentist chair mid-way through a complicated procedure, or,
indeed, in the middle of life: "There's no place to go
but forward."

In the clarity of that realization, my mind relaxed, and I
listened. Each person's story seemed touching to me --
everyone told the truth about his or her current struggle. By
and by, the people I had negative feelings about told their
stories as well, and I discovered that I felt the same about
them as about the people before and after them. My mind was
clear and focused. I was relaxed. I wasn't adding to that
experience all the stories I had in my memory bank. I was
seeing everyone just as they were. It was a tremendous
relief. My insight that we are all, after all, just doing our
best with the circumstances of our lives to manage
gracefully, authentically and with integrity had a
transformative effect. Everyone became my friend. And I felt
a friend to everyone.

I think that equanimity, the last of the
paramis, is the ability to feel and understand, in wisdom,
that everyone and everything is different, legitimately, as a
result of different causes. To live in a friendly,
non-adversarial relationship with all things, with all
people, and with our lives is the source of greatest
equanimity.